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Why will you not use it?" Justine waited a moment; then her resolve gathered itself into words. "If I have any influence, I am not sure it would be well to use it as you suggest." "Not to urge Mr. Amherst's return?" "No not now." She caught the same veiled gleam of incredulity under Mrs. Ansell's lids caught and disregarded it. "It must be now or never," Mrs. Ansell insisted.
Against all this wicked nonsense, against the Wilbrahams and Pembrokes who try to rule our world Stephen would fight till he died. Stephen was a hero. He was a law to himself, and rightly. He was great enough to despise our small moralities. He was attaining love. This evening Rickie caught Ansell's enthusiasm, and felt it worth while to sacrifice everything for such a man.
Besides, they had met in a naked extremity of hate, and it was a bond. At any rate, the elemental man in each had met. He went down to the isolation hospital, with Dr. Ansell's card. This sister, a healthy young Irishwoman, led him down the ward. "A visitor to see you, Jim Crow," she said. Dawes turned over suddenly with a startled grunt. "Eh?" "Caw!" she mocked.
She pined for a sight of her husband, and thought of committing Cicely to Mrs. Ansell's care, and making a sudden dash for Hanaford. But the vision of the long evenings in the Westmore drawing-room again restrained her.
He replied discourteously, but he did reply; and if she could have stopped him thinking, her triumph would have been complete. When they rose to go, Agnes held Ansell's hand for a moment in her own. "Good-bye," she said. "It was very unconventional of us to come as we did, but I don't think any of us are conventional people." He only replied, "Good-bye." The ladies started off.
She had been too long isolated in her anxiety, her powerlessness to help; and she had a vague hope that Mrs. Ansell's worldly wisdom might accomplish what her inexperience had failed to achieve. "Shall we sit by the fire? I am glad to find you alone," Mrs.
Ansell a secret sympathy with her own fears; and a sense of this tacit understanding made her examine with sudden interest the face of her unexpected ally.... After all, what did she know of Mrs. Ansell's history of the hidden processes which had gradually subdued her own passions and desires, making of her, as it were, a mere decorative background, a connecting link between other personalities?
But as she withdrew into the back of the box, she was seized by a new fear. If he was still watching, might he not come to the door and try to speak to her? Her only safety lay in remaining in full view of the audience; and she returned to Mrs. Ansell's side. The other members of the party came back the bell rang, the foot-lights blazed, the curtain rose. She lost herself in the mazes of the play.
Ansell's scepticism based itself upon the uncleanliness which was so generally next to godliness in the pious circles round them, and she had been heard to express contempt for the learned and venerable Israelite, who, being accosted by an acquaintance when the shadows of eve were beginning to usher in the Day of Atonement, exclaimed: "For heaven's sake, don't stop me I missed my bath last year."
When in London she chared for her cousin Malka at a shilling a day. Likewise she sewed underlinen and stitched slips of fur into caps in the privacy of home and midnight. For all Mrs. Ansell's industry, the family had been a typical group of wandering Jews, straying from town to town in search of better things.
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